Though it was still rainy here at the Annahoeve in the Netherlands, the KDE 4 multimedia meeting was definitely up to speed. This article will report on the progress the hackers made yesterday, including the "why" and "what" of redesigning and speeding up amaroK, work on the KIO slaves and Phonon.

We had a quick start in the morning, several people where already busy hacking at 9. The morning was filled with hacking sessions and small get-togethers, and a few hours after lunch, we held a round table with everybody, asking what they had done so far.

Christian Mülhäuser and Seb Ruiz have been working on optimization of amaroK startup time. They gave the context browser a speedup of aproximately 50% and the playlist browser now loads 40-60% faster. Meanwhile, Bart Cerneels was working on the Podcasts. They sometimes have very long names, with a lot of redundancy. He tried to build some code to shorten them, without having to throw away information. And Martin Aumüller made it possible to drag'n'drop files from any KDE application into amaroK. amaroK then adds them to the database, by putting them in a sensible location based on the tags in the file.

Matthias Kretz redesigned large parts of Phonon completely today, after a talk with Thomas Zander (of KOffice fame). He decided to start experimenting with a few internals, which had to lead to a more flexible system. The currently almost stable backend API won't be affected, tough. Talks with the amaroK hackers also prompted him to enhance the communication between applications and Phonon. Christian Esken, who came visit today, has been working with us on Kmix. In cooperation with usability expert Florian Grässle and Matthias, they decided on the implementation of several features. Solid integration went in Kmix, so hotplugging will work in the future version of KMix. Florian also teamed up with Mark Kretschmann to enhance the usability of the script control in amaroK, while our other usability expert, Dan Leinir Jensen Turthra, worked with several other amaroK developers to create the next-generation amaroK interface.

Allan Sandfield Jensen has been working on KIO file seeking (as part of his Google Summer of Code project), and his announcement of a more-or-less working implementation was recieved by a big applause from the other attending hackers. His work will bring the network transparancy of KDE to a whole new level, allowing for easy playing of music over a network or directly editing of movies and pictures on a remote machine.

Ian Monroe and Max Howell have been working on better error messages for the users if there is no mp3 support in the distribution they use. The distribution has to provide a script for amaroK so it can offer the user to automatically install the nessecary codecs. Cooperation has already been promised by Jonathan Riddell from Kubuntu.

A few hours after lunch, the amaroK developers spent considerable time whiteboarding and discussing the basic design of our favorite audio player. This time they went really in-depth, and there was a heavy discussion going on. Thomas has been working with the amaroK developers today on several design and usability issues, and was also involved in the whiteboarding of amaroK 2. An important goal was to design amaroK to become smaller, and thus faster and easier to maintain. By improving amaroK's design, they hope to make it easier to develop things like extensive plugin support. But design-wise this is hard to do and there are serious security-related issues. Aside from the basic design, things like quality control, usability and the “target user” for amaroK have been discussed.

Meanwhile, the developers not involved with the discussion generally used earphones to avoid the discussion and continued to hack away, or talked in small groups. Gabor and Alexandre have been busy porting amaroK to Qt 4, and they got close to getting it to compile.

Slowly but steadily, the discussion dis-integrated, and more beer started to flow in. So, now the whiteboard had been filled enough, dinner was served. After the excellent diner everybody went upstairs again to continue their work or implement some of the stuff that has been discussed.

To wrap things up, this has been an extremely productive day, both in terms of code, design and face-to-face interaction. So, it is past midnight now, so time to get everybody to our hotel in Zundert - we have to be at breakfeast at 8:15...

Comments

I would be interested in what Florian's opinion is, in regard of enabling the amaroK custom icons by default.

For those amongs you readers who would like to make clear that you prefer standard KDE icons for amaroK by default, remember that you can vote for the appropriate bug at http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=125295

I have used the custom icon set of Amarok for several months now:
Yes, they look very cool
No, they don't reduce usability.

Think about it:
The developers are the ones doing the decisions. If they like their own icons more, then they should enable them. If some non contributing users think otherwise they can always switch back to the KDE icons.

So please stop whining about icons. There are much more important things.

> So please stop whining about icons. There are much more important things.

I know there are. But I trust the amaroK developers to take care of all those more important things, as they continue making amaroK the best music player out there. I don't trust them in respect with the icon thingie, so I try to take care of that by myself. I believe it's important enough to spend a little time on it.

I don't claim being a usability expert.
I'd rather like to hear what the real ones have to say about this issue.
I thought if the amaroK devs have come together with an "external" usability guy (Florian) for 2 days they may have exchanged their thoughts here. Maybe they haven't.

All I wanted is a clear answer, like:
- We haven't touched this issue. or maybe:
- We talked about it, and the outcome was ...
Whatever. But of course it's easier to accuse someone of trolling instead of trying to find common ground.

ade: Hey Allan, you added seeking to KIO, right? So you can just fseek() your way to the hotel.
allan: No, it's still buggy, I will deadlock and stay right here.
ade: No problem, we can put you on the D-BUS.

[[ Note: since I was driving, there was no beer involved on my side. ]]

"Just the place for a Snark!" the Bellman cried,
As he landed his crew with care;
Supporting each man on the top of the tide
By a finger entwined in his hair.
"Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What i tell you three times is true."

Why isn't anything said about Kaffeine? Isn't that part of KDE?
It could use a little polish from the amarok artists :) (no not the icon part).
And perhaps a script to install libdvdcss like amarok can do for mp3 support (with a notification for it being quite illegal in the US, but legal in 95% of the other countries on this planet)

Funny how you say "another". It already received a ton of useless tabs and buttons and toolbar configurability with Kaffeine 0.5. The 0.4.3 layout was quite elegant IMHO and very usable. I still use that version, recompiling once in a while to keep it running with newer libs.